The feminine mystique

Gore Gore Girls got gams and Gretsches!

Untitled Document
Gretsches and gams, gams and Gretsches. That’s
the Gore Gore Girls’ bag, and if it’s not yours, well, you
can’t say you weren’t warned. The cover of the Detroit
quartet’s new CD, Get the Gore, says it all: two curvy lower limbs, set off to
pornalicious perfection in stiletto do-me boots, and one curvy vintage
Gretsch guitar, equipped with a Bigsby tremolo bar and eagle-embossed pick
guard. The iconography isn’t subtle, but it’s effective. The
Gore Gore Girls are, to swipe a term coined by rad-fem blogger Twisty
Faster, empowerful. They’re doing it for themselves in their vinyl microminis.
They’re beating the boys at their own game while the boys beat, uh,
other stuff. It’s all depressingly consistent with the new
bikini-waxing, cleavage-flaunting, Suicide Girls-sanctioned school of
feminism, whose naïve adherents labor under the delusion that
they’re sex-positive free agents subverting the patriarchy by —
and this is the tricky part, the undoing of many a starry-eyed pole dancer
— reinscribing its core values. See, all you have to do is invert the
paradigm (chicks on top!), and voilà: You’re no longer just another slab of helpless meat;
you’re a fully emancipated hamburger patty, ready to leap onto the
grill unassisted. You go-go, Gore Gore Girls!Yeah, I know: It’s unfair to blame the Gore
Gore Girls for failing to dismantle the patriarchy when they just want to
have fun, and, given their ravenous appetite for misogyny-marinated retro
rawk, a certain amount of cognitive dissonance seems inevitable. The band
— which consists of guitarist/singer and principal songwriter Amy
Surdu (a.k.a. Amy Gore), lead guitarist Marlene “Hammer”
Hammerle, bassist Carol Anne Schumacher (also of the Detroit Cobras), and
drummer Nicky Styxx — is named after a movie by grindhouse auteur
Herschell Gordon Lewis. One of the songs on the album was co-written by
notorious hustler/hack, Runaways Svengali, and alleged woman-hater Kim
Fowley. This all jibes nicely with the band’s predilection for
’60s garage-punk and girl-group tropes; between the raunchy
self-assertion of the former and the melodramatic self-immolation of the
latter, there’s not much room for advanced gender studies. In light of these philosophical and conceptual
shortcomings, all that remains is to judge the Gore Gore Girls on the
merits of their music. Extricating the raw product from the hyperstylized
package isn’t easy — image is a big part of the Gore Gore
Girls’ mystique, as it is for many of their peers, not excluding the
ones with Y chromosomes. Still, it’s fair to ask whether anyone would
care about this album if it weren’t the handiwork of four hot young
women. The answer, it pains me to say, is probably no. That said, Get the Gore isn’t an all-out suckfest. The playing,
especially Surdu’s and Hammerle’s dueling guitars, is
consistently competent, if rarely compelling. Surdu doesn’t have a
wide range or infallible pitch, but her gutsy growl gets the job done, most
notably on straightforward garage rave-ups “Fox in a Box” and
“Don’t Cry,” when it blossoms into a full-blown bellow.
Oddball instrumental flourishes, such as the groovy sitar on the psych-pop
obscurity “Where Evil Grows,” lend a bit of flair to the
standard-issue dirt-rock formula. Peppy handclaps break up the requisite
fuzztone sludge; sassy call-and-response backing vocals sweeten the Ellie
Greenwich/Jeff Barry/Phil Spector gem “All Grown Up” and
Surdu’s deeply goofy but undeniably catchy “Sweet
Potato.” But the sad fact is, every midsize town in America has at
least a couple of bands that sound like the Gore Gore Girls. Unfortunately
for them, they don’t look as good in miniskirts. Contact René Spencer Saller at
rssaller@core.com.